Symposium Urges Youth Agencies To Be 'Hip' to City Teenagers

NEW YORK--It became clear that this was no ordinary symposium when
the four presenters grabbed their microphones from the dais and began
to rap.

"My life is mixed up and needs to be fixed up!'' exclaimed Lamar
Gober, 16, of Philadelphia, one of the younger members of the rap group
Sounds of Rage.

Some members of the audience wore neckties, others sported hooded
sweatshirts with "Flavor'' written across the front. Inner-city
teenagers sat among representatives of churches, nonprofit
organizations, and federal agencies. The speakers included the rap
stars Chubb Rock and Chuck D.

The symposium, held last week at a hotel here, was entitled
"Reaching the Hip-Hop Generation.'' Its goal was to give groups and
agencies that are trying to reach young people like Lamar a better
understanding of the cultural and communication dynamics of their
audience.

The symposium was inspired by a market research study funded by the
Robert Wood Johnson Foundation concluding that most campaigns to
encourage black urban teenagers to avoid drugs, stay in school, protect
themselves from AIDS, and engage in other positive behaviors have
failed miserably. (See Education Week, June 10, 1992.)

In an effort to develop an effective strategy for reaching members
of the "hip-hop'' culture, which grows out of the rap-music scene, the
symposium brought the intended recipients of such messages together
with the human-service providers, educators, and policymakers who are
trying to send them.

On hand to help bridge the gap between the two groups were rappers,
music-video producers, filmmakers, a magazine publisher, and
entertainment and advertising executives.

Sponsored by Motivational Educational Entertainment, the black-owned
research and consulting firm that conducted the study, the event drew
support from Robert Wood Johnson, the federal departments of Energy and
Health and Human Services, and the federal Center for Substance Abuse
Prevention.

"I go to hundreds of conferences on the problems of inner-city
youth, but we rarely get the insight of youth on their own
conditions,'' said Ronald B. Mincy, a senior research associate at the
Urban Institute.

The Rev. Rodney S. Sadler Jr., the assistant director for
leadership-development programs at the Congress of National Black
Churches, said that the task of reaching members of the hip-hop culture
"challenges organizations and institutions to be responsive to a group
that is fundamentally counterinstitutional.''

"We have to accept their culture as a valid culture and utilize
their media to reach them,'' he said.

'Spiral of Silence'

The market study, released last May, found that black urban
teen-agers inhabit a closed subculture that encourages dangerous
behavior, threatens to ostracize those who do not conform to its views,
and appears almost as alienated from its own African-American
traditions as it is from the white mainstream.

"The youth are going around making up their own rules,'' said Chuck
D, a member of the prominent rap group Public Enemy.

"Black youth,'' he added, "are not waiting for society to deliver
the facts.''

Patrick R. McLaurin, the marketing firm's research director,
characterized the hip-hop culture as diverse, differentiated by age and
sex, extremely male-centered, and focused on issues related to power
and sex.

Members of this culture also tend to receive little positive
reinforcement when they do well in school or elsewhere. Their fear of
saying something that will cause them to be ostracized, combined with a
taboo against judging the actions of others, help to create a "spiral
of silence'' that prevents them from trying to positively influence
their peers' attitudes toward drugs, sex, and other issues, the study
found.

Chubb Rock, who often delivers positive messages in his music,
observed that many members of the hip-hop culture want to communicate
with their parents, but feel "parents want to preach instead of
listen.''

Swanie G. Phillips, a community-outreach coordinator for a clinic at
the Center for Research on Adolescent Drug Abuse at Temple University,
said African-American adults are mistaken if they think today's black
youths are simply going through the same things they did.

Craig Lewis, an 18-year-old from Chicago, concurred.

"In the 50's and 60's, you worried about fist fights. Now, we worry
about Uzi [submachine guns],'' he observed. "You worried about
syphilis. Now we worry about AIDS.''

The market study and other research efforts have also found that
black urban youths are voracious consumers of nonprint media. They
typically go to the movies about once a week and live in households
where television is watched about 77 hours per week, about 50 percent
more than the average for other groups.

Yet the typical member of the hip-hop culture also "is a very
sophisticated media consumer,'' easily able to tune out public-service
and commercial messages, said Ivan J. Juzang, the marketing firm's
president.

A black teenage girl interviewed in one of the firm's videos
describes public-service messages as appropriate "for 7-year-olds.'' A
teenage boy talks of seeing an anti-drug commercial "and going right
back on the street, and putting that stuff up my nose, and thinking
about the commercial while I'm doing it.''

Using television to reach these youths is difficult because the
medium tends to be "G-rated'' and thus unable to address the harsh
reality of their culture, said Alonzo Brown, a senior vice president of
Uptown Entertainment who is developing a television situation comedy
and feature films aimed at black audiences.

R-rated movies and rap music have the most potential for getting
positive messages across, participants agreed.

Racing Madison Avenue

But however effective they are, public-service campaigns account for
just a small fraction of the messages bombarding young people, and all
the media need to become more sensitive to their impact on urban
youths, several participants said.

They also expressed concern that their findings on how to reach the
hip-hop culture also could be used to help corporations further exploit
the black-youth market to sell such products as malt liquor and
tobacco.

"We want to know that we are not being used,'' said Lumumba Bandele,
a 21-year-old member of a rap group.

But since corporations will do their own research anyway, Mr. Juzang
said, at least the symposium can make the data available to nonprofit
and other groups that probably would not do such research
otherwise.

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